Most sermons begin with prayer. Often it is a prayer which asks God to hide the preacher from view. “Let my words be forgotten, so that only what comes from you is remembered” the preacher intones. I have heard experienced pastors say this as often as students. It is easy to see why. It is a terrifying thing to take the word of God upon your lips. Like the apostle Paul, we do not always feel that we are equal to the task. We do not want to get in God’s way. We do not want to obscure the message and we don’t want to embarrass ourselves or speak anything that we will have to recant later. We wonder if God might not be better served if our preaching were like the Cheshire cat’s grin. That is to say, we think it would be better if we just disappeared, so that only his Word remained.
Such prayers are well intended but misguided, if only because the first petition hardly requires an act of God. Forgetting what the preacher has said is a common occurrence among our hearers, an accomplishment which rarely necessitates divine intervention. As for the rest of the prayer, it is my contention that it misses the point. To ask God to make the preacher disappear from view fails to grasp the nature of preaching.
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The Necessary Preacher
Preaching is a divine word but it is also a human word. The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1). The angels can preach (Matt. 28:6; Mark 16:6; Luke 24:6; Gal. 1:8; Rev. 14:6). But it is to the children of Adam that the gospel has been committed (Gal. 2:7; 1 Thess. 2:4; 1 Tim. 1:11; 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14; Titus 1:3; Jude 1:3). We cannot become invisible and hide ourselves from our listeners when we preach, no matter how hard we might try. Nor should we want to do so. It is my contention that the preacher is necessary to preaching. When Paul asserts in 1 Corinthians 3:7 that “neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything,” the obvious correlative is that the preacher is nothing. But it does not follow from this that the preacher is unnecessary. If anything, the apostle’s chain of questions of Romans 10:14 implies the opposite: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”
In order for hearing to occur there must be preaching. The Word who “didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb” does not shrink from employing the human tongue to declare his word. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you;” Jesus promised his disciples in Acts 1:8, “and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Inflecting the Text
The role of the preacher in preaching is more than simply serving as the medium by which the content of the gospel is conveyed. Preaching is by its very nature an exercise in inflecting the biblical text. We instinctively recognize the need for this in exegesis when we puzzle over an uninflected text, relying upon clues from the context and our own imagination to re-animate it. We do this in order to understand the author’s true intent and translate it for our listeners. Inflection of the text in preaching involves more than using pitch, volume and tone in our delivery. The preacher inflects the text for the audience by speaking the biblical author’s words into the contemporary context. This task places a dual obligation upon the preacher. One obligation is to the text itself. The preacher’s aim in the sermon is to animate the text without altering it. The written word has been detached from its original context but is not freed from it. The fact that we must speak to circumstances that the biblical writers did not originally envision does not give us liberty to wrest the Scriptures from their original context and make them say whatever we please.
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The other obligation is to the audience. An uninflected text is a dead text as far as the listener is concerned. “Somehow or other, every other agency dealing with the public recognizes that contact with the actual life of the auditor is the one place to begin” Harry Emerson Fosdick chided preachers during the early part of the 20th century. “Only the preacher proceeds still upon the idea that folk come to church desperately anxious to discover what happened to the Jebusites.”
At the same time, preachers cannot afford to ignore what happened to the Jebusites, any more than they can afford to overlook those who are actually present as the sermon is being delivered. A sermon which focuses only on the concerns of the contemporary audience and pays no attention to the historical and literary context of Scripture co-opts the text instead of inflecting it, turning the living and active Word into a ventriloquist’s dummy. Such preaching is little more than a caricature whose hollow voice merely echoes the preacher’s own thinking.
The Danger of Preaching Ourselves
Inflecting the text is necessary to preaching but it is also dangerous. The preaching environment, with its “captive” audience and monologue style, is especially vulnerable to narcissism. Furthermore, even in our best moments we are preaching with mixed motives. I want to declare God’s word clearly but I also want my audience to like the sermon. I want my listeners to focus on the text of Scripture and direct their attention to Christ but I also like the fact that I have their undivided attention for these few minutes. The audience is often an unwitting conspirator in this secret self-worship. Their response to the sermon is driven as much by the personality of the preacher sermon as it is by the content of the message. Unfortunately, while the sin can be avoided, the temptation cannot. “For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord,” Paul explains, “and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5). We do not preach ourselves but we cannot remove ourselves from the act of preaching.
Writers often use the metaphor of “voice” to speak of an author’s personality and unique point of view. Preaching too is concerned with “voice,” both in this literary as well as in a more literal sense. In the sermon the preacher gives “voice” to the text by providing a contextualized understanding of the passage. This is the result of insight afforded by the Holy Spirit through the preacher’s study. But it is also an insight which is mediated to the audience through the preacher. In other words, the unique gift that the preacher brings to the sermon is the filter of his own personality and experience.
In a sermon on the white stone and new name of Revelation 2:17, fantasy writer and 19th century Scottish preacher George MacDonald describes each person as having both an individual relationship with God and a unique relation to God: “He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else; for when he is perfected he shall receive the new name which no one else can understand.”[1] for MacDonald, this meant that each person is blessed with a distinctive angle of vision when it comes to understanding God: “Hence, he can worship God as no man else can worship him, can understand God as no man else can understand him. This or that man may understand God more, may understand God better than he, but no other man can understand God as he understands him.”[2]
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If MacDonald is right, every preacher speaks with a distinct voice and provides a unique perspective into God and his word. The sermon is not a bare re-statement of the text. It is a reflection on the text after it has passed through the experience and personality of the preacher. It is an embodied truth. This personal element means that the best preaching is marked by a kind of homiletical nakedness. Dynamic preaching gives listeners the sense that they know God through the preacher. But this privilege of incarnating the message is also a responsibility. Properly harnessed and appropriately expressed, such self-disclosure can be disarming. When it is mishandled, it distorts the sermon the way a gaudy frame distracts the viewer’s attention from the picture it is meant to accent.
The margin of error between inflection and self-absorption is narrower than a razor’s edge. There is only one tether strong enough to keep the preacher from slipping from appropriate self-disclosure into narcissism. That is the anchor of God’s truth. It is only by giving careful attention to the message of Scripture that we are able to reign in on our natural bent toward self absorption. Paul is right after all. We do not preach ourselves. We preach Christ.
1 George MacDonald, “The New Name,” in Unspoken Sermons, (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), 110-111.
2 Ibid., 111.
John Koessler is professor and chair of the Pastoral Studies Department at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois.
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